That's SO Germany! issue one: Schinken

That's so Germany! Is my attempt to make up for being a lazy and neglectful blogger all these months. It takes every week (or so... you know me.) as subject a new thing that's SO uniquely or interestingly German.

Schinken

I was taught in German class all those years ago that "Schinken" was the German word for ham. At the time, I visualized a big baked ham like shown in a cartoons as the object of some poor dog's lust, complete with crisscross pattern and a large anatomically incorrect bone sticking out. Nothing could be further from the truth. That would be a kind of schinken, for sure, but the German word encompasses far more preparations of pig than the measly American "ham".

Though I didn't realize it at the time, one of the first things I ate in Germany was Schinken. My flight got in to Frankfurt at about 7:00 in the morning local time —the middle of the night, according to my circadian rhythm. The first thing my host family did after getting home was to sit down to breakfast, and so I sat myself down for a midnight snack. There are many unusual things about German meals, which I will write about in a further installment, so I just did what everybody else was doing: took a roll, cut it in half, spread butter on it, and put a piece of strange, paper-thin meat on each side. It was really good! Salt, and meat flavor, and fat... all the good things about meat without the mass to chew.

Schinken, as I found out later, is not cooked, simply smoked or salted and then cut really thin. This explains the lack of this delicacy in America: My first reaction to the idea of uncooked meat was disgust. For some reason, we view uncooked meat with extreme suspicion. Everything must be, for German standards, cooked to a cinder before it is declared safe to eat. And keeping meat, raw or cooked, just sitting in the fridge like all my German families? Unthinkable. How have they not all died of salmonella?

But, like most German meat products, the stuff is too good to be grossed out by. Schinken is one of those things I'm going to miss back in the US, for sure.